Mass Media

Medium

a means of communication or expression

All mediated communication involves a(n)

sender-> message-> medium-> receiver

Mass Medium

technology that allows for "one-to-many" communication, across some degree of time and space, typically to receivers whose identity is unknown to the sender

Battle of New Orleans

-Fought December 24, 1814 through January 8, 1815

-Treaty of Ghent ending the war had been signed Dec 24

Narrowcasting

targeting media programming at specific populations within society

Broadcasting

the transmission of media to a wide public audience

Media Stacking

unrelated use of multiple devices

Media Nesting/ Multimedia

the integration of multiple content forms (text, audio, images etc) into a single digital

Lord J.G. Hubbard, (1868) letter to his conservative party chairman

claiming newspapers and plays featuring immoral characters were corrupting the youth

Amusing Ourselves to Death (Neil Postman; 1931 - 2003)

believed that written language fostered critical analytic thinking, caused public discourse.

He thought television made us dumb and disengaged

Orwell vs. Huxley

Orwell feared those who would ban books

Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one

Why does so much stuff suck?

1. Limited Competition

2. Chasing Unicorns

Conglomeration/ Consolidation/ Concentration

The Illusion of Choice; like 3 companies own hundreds of branch companies

The "Hit System"

A business strategy in the entertainment industry

companies chase one or two huge blockbuster successes, rather than aim for a larger number of modest successes.

Optimal Distinctiveness Theory (Optimal Differentiation)

To thrive in the "hit system," entertainment companies try to find a balance between content that is familiar enough to be safe, but different enough to feel new.

Web 2.0 was revolutionary in two ways:

-It allowed all of us to create content for a mass audience

-It changed the nature of what content could be

Enshittification (Doctorow)

When a tech platform makes their product intentionally worse, for both end users and business customers, because they know leaving the platform isn't an option

Cory Doctorow

Founder of blogs Boing Boing and Pluralistic

Former director of Electronic Frontier Foundation, advocating for online consumer rights

Award-winning sci-fi novelist

The "Natural History" of Enshittification (Doctorow)

1. platforms are good to their users.

2. they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers.

3. they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves.

Network Effects

a service gets more valuable to its users as additional people start using it

Collective Action Problem

An activity/choice that is hard for an individual to do, unless a critical mass of other people do it with them